The relationship of friendship differs from other interpersonal relationships, even those characterized by mutual caring, such as relationships among colleagues: friendships are, intuitively, “deeper,” more intimate relationships. The question facing any philosophical account is how that characteristic intimacy of friendship is to be understood.

On this point, there is considerable variation in the literature—so much that it raises the question whether differing accounts aim at elucidating the same object. For it seems as though when the analysis of intimacy is relatively weak, the aim is to elucidate what might be called “acquaintance friendships”; as the analysis of intimacy gets stronger, the aim seems to tend towards closer friendships and even to a kind of ideal of maximally close friendship. It might be asked whether one or another of these types of friendship ought to take priority in the analysis, such that, for example, cases of close friendship can be understood to be an enhanced version of acquaintance friendship, or whether acquaintance friendship should be understood as being deficient in various ways relative to ideal friendship. Nonetheless, in what follows, views will be presented roughly in order from weaker to stronger accounts of intimacy.

To begin, "X" claims that we should understand what is here called the intimacy of friendship in terms of mutual self-disclosure: I tell my friends things about myself that I would not dream of telling others, and I expect them to make me privy to intimate details of their lives. The point of such mutual self-disclosure, Thomas argues, is to create the “bond of trust” essential to friendship, for through such self-disclosure we simultaneously make ourselves vulnerable to each other and acknowledge the goodwill the other has for us. Such a bond of trust is what institutes the kind of intimacy characteristic of friendship.

It is not the sharing of private information nor even of very personal information, as such, that contributes to the bonds of trust and intimacy between companion friends. At best it is the sharing of what friends care about that is relevant here.
Their point is that the secrets view underestimates the kind of trust at issue in friendship, conceiving of it largely as a matter of discretion. Given the way friendship essentially involves each caring about the other's good for the other's sake and so acting on behalf of the other's good, entering into and sustaining a relationship of friendship will normally involve considerable trust in your friend's goodwill towards you generally, and not just concerning your secrets. Moreover, friendship will normally involve trust in your friend's judgment concerning what is in your best interests, for when your friend sees you harming yourself, she ought, other things being equal, to intervene, and through the friendship you can come to rely on her to do so.

An important question to ask, however, is what precisely is meant by the “sharing” of a sense of value. Once again there are weaker and stronger versions. On the weak side, a sense of value is shared in the sense that a coincidence of interests and values is a necessary condition of developing and sustaining a friendship; when that happy coincidence dissipates, so too does the friendship.
A friend, then, is one who wishes and does good (or apparently good) things to a friend, for the friend's sake, wishes the friend to exist and live, for his own sake, spends time with his friend, makes the same choices as his friend and finds the same things pleasant and painful as his friend.

It should be clear that friends share values only in that these values happen to coincide; if that were the case, the conception of friendship would be vulnerable to the charge that the friends really are not concerned for each other but merely for the intrinsically valuable properties that each exemplifies. .

It is a bit unclear what your role is in being thus directed and interpreted by your friend. Is it a matter of merely passively accepting the direction and interpretation? Yet this would seem to be a matter of ceding your autonomy to your friend, and that is surely not what they intend. Rather, it seems, we are at least selective in the ways in which we allow our friends to direct and interpret us, and we can resist other directions and interpretations. However, this raises the question of why we allow any such direction and interpretation. One answer would be because we recognize the independent value of the interests of our friends, or that we recognize the truth of their interpretations of us. But this would not explain the role of friendship in such direction and interpretation, for we might just as easily accept such direction and interpretation from a mentor or possibly even a stranger. This shortcoming might push us to understanding our receptivity to direction and interpretation not in dispositional terms but rather in normative terms: other things being equal, we ought to accept direction and interpretation from our friends precisely because they are our friends. And this might push us to a still stronger conception of intimacy, of the sharing of values, in terms of which we can understand why friendship grounds these norms.

The point is that the friends “share” a conception of values not merely in that there is significant overlap between the values of the one friend and those of the other, and not merely in that this overlap is maintained through the influence that the friends have on each other. Rather, the values are shared in the sense that they are most fundamentally their values, at which they jointly arrive by deliberating together.

what about the boy and the girl is closed friends do they really have to tell each other about their deepest secret or should also they have their own private things that only theirselves know????

well this lesson it's about the friendship intimacy...sharing ur troubles,joy,apprehensions,confusions,happiness and in the same time u have to be there for ur friend when she/he will pass through the same feelings...and this thing it's not related to the age ,gender(male ,feminin)...now ur other question about telling ur friend (male) about ur deepest secret..hehe that only u can decide it.....but sometimes is better to have ur private things for urself too^^
btw..my eng sucks sometimes..so..sorry if i wasn't too explicit...for any other questions i'm here^^

what about the boy and the girl is closed friends do they really have to tell each other about their deepest secret or should also they have their own private things that only theirselves know????

well this lesson it's about the friendship intimacy...sharing ur troubles,joy,apprehensions,confusions,happiness and in the same time u have to be there for ur friend when she/he will pass through the same feelings...and this thing it's not related to the age ,gender(male ,feminin)...now ur other question about telling ur friend (male) about ur deepest secret..hehe that only u can decide it.....but sometimes is better to have ur private things for urself too^^
btw..my eng sucks sometimes..so..sorry if i wasn't too explicit...for any other questions i'm here^^

what about the boy and the girl is closed friends do they really have to tell each other about their deepest secret or should also they have their own private things that only theirselves know????

well this lesson it's about the friendship intimacy...sharing ur troubles,joy,apprehensions,confusions,happiness and in the same time u have to be there for ur friend when she/he will pass through the same feelings...and this thing it's not related to the age ,gender(male ,feminin)...now ur other question about telling ur friend (male) about ur deepest secret..hehe that only u can decide it.....but sometimes is better to have ur private things for urself too^^
btw..my eng sucks sometimes..so..sorry if i wasn't too explicit...for any other questions i'm here^^